- Make a backup of your save! - If you make a stupid purchase of a ship, play the next mission and save it, there is no going back. That money is lost unless you have a backup save somewhere.

- Play through the easier difficulties first! - This one may seem obvious but some people still insist on playing games on their hardest difficulty first. This is not one of those games. You need to know exactly how each level will play out.

- On the level "Omega" take out the red sphere following the boss first! - Again this one may seem obvious but the red sphere increases the bosses damage ten fold and you will die very quickly if you don't get rid of this sphere fast!

With the tutorial on, this is easy. Seek out the planet, then head to the second planet. Some aliens will attack (three ships). Kill any one ship and the other two will disappear. Head to the nebula and tractor beam the smaller destroyer.

That will be your first ship in the fleet (U.S.S. Coto). You can keep this ship if you like, or sell it later. As you can already foresee, grouping your ships together so they hunt in a pack is very helpful. You will get a second combat once you are close enough to the Vulcan ship in the north east. If you need to restart the mission to re-learn things, do it. The lessons here will be applied through the rest of the game.

Hopefully, you saved the game before clicking on 'Next Mission'. If not, whoops. Start again from the top, Sam. Consider buying a Yorktown-class battleship and making your fleet more capable. You will be more than prepared for the alien dudes who look like Spock when they try to gangbang the Vulcan ship you saved the last mission.

To protect the Vulcans, all you do is stick around and blast the invading Romulans. They appear from teh nebula, so their ships will be pre-damaged ... this makes it easier to defeat them. An abandoned shipyard is a little bit off to the south can repair one ship at a time if you use order a ship to move there on the tacmap. However, the crew repairs can be just as effective, unless you aren't paying attention. The final vessel is a Romulan battleship. Kill all enemies and you win.

Recommended Purchase -- Yorktown-class battleship if you don't have one already

This is a tough mission if you don't attack right off the bat. You can do this with the three ships from the last mission as well. When you begin, warp your fleet to the northwest area (to the left of the northwest planet) and detect the enemy starbase. Use the battleship and one other ship to aggressively destroy the starbase, the shipyard, and then move back to defend the medical ships.

You have to defend the three medical ships. If all three are destroyed, you lose. Enemy ambushes occur at each of the planets (enemy ships either spawn or warp past your sensors), so you need to move some of your ships back to defend your hospital ships. The battleship can destroy the starbase easily once the base has taken damage, but not earlier.

Final enemy ambushes usually occur at the northern planets. For the bonus mission (more points if carried out), use any ship to orbit the indicated planet (southern most one) and use one of the scan, hail, or transport commands to get the patients. Warp to the ship labelled 'Bach' and it should go through.

Simalcrum noticed why this crap didn't flag successful last time; you have to go to each planet that hails Archer and transport their dying losers to the U.S.S. Bach before all the planets are cured, while you're fighting the pointy-earred alien freaks with the alabaster skin, and with the General Orders in effect. Bleyah! The second time around, simalcrum found two planets doing the vomitorium and made two transporter trips between the Bach and the afflicted planet (in between some firefights), and the objective was checked off. The objective is optional, but it earns you more prestige (for ship buying) if the mission is cleared.

Once all the planets are freed from green alien fart, you win. To get the achievement for keeping all ships alive, do the mission with this strategy but keep the NX-Enterprise back to shadow your medical ships; the key to keeping all the ships alive is by destroying the enemy starbase as quickly as possible so you free your forces for escort duty.

Recommended Purchase -- Yorktown-class battleship if you don't have one already

If you have this on a harder difficulty (why you are is stupid, considering you need to learn about the game first, kaydet) you may need to trade the destroyer from the first mission for a second battleship. However, that isn't mandatory. Begin by scanning the planet and following the drone. Beat off the ambush and get a new mission to locate the origin of the poison.

There's a slight breather after destroying the container ship -- the timer won't start until you near one of the planets, so repair your fleet. The next three space stations have to be destroyed before the aliens get 2000 units of poison. You should move your flotilla in force and focus just on the starbases near the planets on the east side. Once each station is destroyed, you can warp to the next planet.

At the final refinery, the cloaked station will appear and spawn alien ships. Go to the marked sector of space in your tacmap. Kill all the marked ships to reveal the cloaked station. Destroy this station, and every pointy earred alien elf freak on board to win the stage. If alien females don't have four arms, six breasts and two to five vaginas, simalcrum says they're not interesting enough for human seduction.

For the achievement, the poison units harvested needs to be kept below 600 to 700 units; a difficult task if you retained the cruiser, destroyer, and battleship fleet; you may need to make a special campaign to do this (and waste command points) and buy two NX cruisers and a battleship to blast the enemy harvesting stations quickly (that or have the destroyer chase down the chemical container ships).

Recommended Purchase -- Yorktown-class battleship if you don't have one already

This is the big one. If your destroyer gets blasted, you can change it to a more robust ship. Lost ships cannot be sold for money in the next shop, so don't lose ships unless you can't help it. Your goal is to defend the starbase and keep the three biowar ships from escaping the edge of the map. Here're the kickers -- there're 50+ ships against you, and the biowar ships can't be blown up except by the starbase (which has its special laser).

Begin by dividing your fleet -- move the faster ships to the farther areas of the forward bases and take out enemies. When enough enemies are clustered around each station, pick any ship and issue a 'hail' to the station to blow it up. The blast will disable enemy ships (not yours). Do this at all four of the stations and get rid of a few enemies each time.

Once all four stations are used (or if the enemies get close enough to the Federation starbase), you have to use your combined fleet might to disable the three marked biogenic drone ships for the starbase to cut them apart like wet tissue at a snot party. If any of the drone ships reach the starbase, or if the starbase is wrecked, you die. The strategy for this mission is simple, but mastering the tactics will be hard.

The mission ends once all three biogenic weapon ships are destroyed by your friendly starbase. Naturally, you disable the ships by phaser fire. Then you play the waiting game. Good luck.

Stage 6 - The SqueezeYou should have -- Constitution-class Enterprise cruiser (Kirk) -- any ships you had from the previous era, except Archer's NX

Now that you have ships with shields, you may find your battleship out-dated. Consider selling both vessels and picking up a new battleship or complimentary destroyer. You definitely fight more here than in the next stage, but you don't want something that will hold you back. A destroyer is more cost-effective than the battleship, since you can use the destroyer's speed in a few more stages afterwards.

The goal here is to disable an enemy vessel, then tow it back to your starting base. The problem is that enemies constantly respawn and are infinite. You can delay the enemy by disabling the shields of the enemy starbases and transporting Federation suicide squads on them. They will take over the starbases and fire on enemies, but they never last through the whole stage. What you wind up doing though, is clearing a path (no enemies) from the middle of the map to the friendly starbase.

Travel to the southern area and fire on the red marked ship until you get a transmission from Kirk about it being disabled. At that point, take your fastest (and best repaired ship) near the target and stop. Use your heftiest ship to fire on the surrounding enemies to draw fire. Take the fast ship and tractor the Klingon Bird of Prey and pump in energy to the engines to get as far north as possible (tacmap helps set a long course).

When the towing ship is taking hull damage, lock onto the Bird of Prey and disable the tractor beam. Warp away and repair. When your vessels are repaired, head back to the disabled ship and start the towing process again. Alternate between shield and engines for the operations menu -- most Klingon ships can't catch up once the Enterprise is under full power to engines (impulse). Each ship you destroy nets you some prestige, so don't stop firing just because of the infinite enemies. Once you reach your starbase, you win.

The achievement for doing this without blasting a single enemy ship is do-able but tedious -- take it on easy and use a destroyer (Miranda-class) instead of a battleship. With the Miranda-class destroyer, you may not have the firepower you want for the next three missions.

Don't buy any new ships yet, because you won't use any yet. Protect the Klingon ship while it powers up the cloak. Your Enterprise and a battleship can take down all the ships with no problems. Even a destroyer and the Enterprise can do that.

Once the first part is done, use the Klingon Bird of Prey to scan three objects -- the trio of shipyards (only one will yield the scan timer), the mining complex where you get a cut-scene, and the large ringworld vagina rip-off with the metal penis stuck through it. You must scan all three to pass the mission. Getting hit while scanning will interrupt your scan, so you need to cloak and do your scan (don't forget the distance for scanning is 3000 or less MM).

The yellow bracketed detectors can locate your cloaked ship, so if you must, destroy them, or find another way around them. At the start, your long range sensors can detect the mining base (left) and the three shipyards (right). Use the edge of the map to recover life and to stalk the yards and mine colony you need to scan. The best thing to do is warp close to the target after a long-range scan hints where you need to go; once you drop out of warp (avoid the yellow marked detector cruiser), cloak and move in with full impulse (and enhanced engine power), stop at 3000 MM do the scan and get ready to warp the hell out once it's done.

It's important to not use any of the 5 photon torpedos on this ship since you need to use them for the final target. Approach the weapon ring from the north and use the cloak to get close (left side, where the detector ship doesn't go). Once you scan the weapon, you can disable the sensor platform with a Picard manuever (with photon torpedo). To attack the sensor pod, use the Picard manuever on the pod and torpedoes on board should be enough to wreck it and clear the mission, regardless how many people are firing on you.

Recommended Purchase -- Proxima-class / Miranda-class if you don't have one already

You can buy one more ship here, or wait for the next stage. You revisit the previous stage and start making trouble. Unless you wander around, your ships should be enough for the Klingons here (they ain't no Borg). Head left and attack the mining colony first. Destroy the mining colonyy (even though it says, 'save allies') and get a allied battleship to help you.

Like other NPC ships, the life it has will not refill, so repair your ships and head east to the shipyards. To seize control of the mining colony, you need to destroy all the Klingon ships that initially appeared in that part of space; until that task force is atomized, your NPC ship will probably get vaporized and you don't get the achievement (and that Russian captain gets vacuum-fucked!)

Destroy the shipyards to prevent more enemies from appearing and repair your fleet. Go after the weapons platform and hunt like a pack. Unlike the first Klingon mission, the enemies here are limited once you destroy the enemy shipyards.

The weapon platform doesn't move, but it has powerful weapons - chiefly the stationary turrets on its perimeter. Focus the fleet to destroy a few of them so you can attack the weapons platform without being subjected to constant disruptor fire. Circle the station and warp away to repair if you need to. Chances are that your NPC ally will die (whatever), but you will come out on top. Keep some distance from the weapons station, or your phasers may not be able to lock on and fire at close range.

Recommended Purchase -- Excelsior-class or Excelsior-refit if you need the firepower

This stage is really easy. Start by moving just your ship (Kirk's) to the energy cannister and scanning it. Destroy the shipyard at a distance of 1200 to 1500 MM to stay clear of the explosive. The explosion won't kill you on easy, but it might on hard (serious, serious damage on medium). In any case, repairing takes out one of your ships, so the hell with that. You may consider sending in one of your support craft, just so your primary ship won't die.

Take down the station's force field and beam aboard a suicide squad. Regroup and repair in the thin part of the nebula and hunt down the three shipyards close by. They will all appear on the tacmap since you are so close to where they are. Just remember to take out the shipyards far away and with one ship; you can control two ships (Enterprise and a battleship) but separately so you won't get them confused and bump into one another if you need to escape.

This stage is a hint that powerful battleships are not always the answer. However, the lesson won't be prevalent until the next stage. You have eight minutes to scan three objects without being shot at. At the end, you fight a fairly powerful boss. If you can hold off buying any ship here, do so. To scan the objects, you simply warp just outside the area of the object (not directly to it) and move in at impulse with engine power at the max. At 3000 MM or less, cut the engines and start the scan. If you are hit during the 10 second scan, you need to do the scan again. If you are being fired on, try scanning with another ship the fleet or have all ships warp away and try again.

When all three arrays are scanned, a boss will appear at the friendly starbase, so warp yourself out of the area. Depending on your fleet make-up and how you want to fight, you can get the boss to start following one of your ships (the A.I. is too dumb to attack other ships once it catches onto one ship), or you can assault the small red orb ship powering the boss' weapons to cut down on its bite (helps a lot). Once, simalcrum managed to get the boss to keep pursuing a severely damaged third ship while Kirk and another ship hounded the boss' assistants and knocked them all out, making that fight very one-sided.

Each of the boss' three assistants will do something, so knock them out first before attacking the fat guy in earnest. Note that the boss has a gravity field, so getting too close will prevent you from warping.

When the Borg Sphere bites its own cyborg ass, you win. Note you cannot play this version of the sphere in multiplayer, so go shove its head into its own butt and show it you're the boss.

The achievement for attacking just the big orb without touching the support orbs is hard only if you don't lead off the boss with a ship -- once the boss starts chasing one of you ships, that ship can flee all over the map while the other ships attack relentlessly.

Stage 11 - RevelationsYou should have -- Constellation-class Stargazer cruiser (Picard, acting) -- anything left over from the previous era

Recommended Purchase -- Apollo-class scout

Okay, this mission is total crap. As it turns out, you may want to spend $3200 prestige to get a scout-class vessel (the Stargazer is fast, but not as much as a scout), or if you are feeling brave, a 'fast-cruiser'. The second vessel you have (usually a left over from the TOS era mission with Kirk) can be sold off since you only need two ships for this mission -- Picard's Stargazer and a fast ship for the final part of the mission. If you are going for the achievement that you retain an Enterprise-era ship to TNG, you can sell that ship off after this mission.

There are three parts to this mission:

(1) Destroy the red marked (see tacmap) stellar debris before they reach any of the three planets in the system. There are ALWAYS three red marked objects; you need to zap the marked ones first since they are the ones that will hit a planet first. You can ignore all the other unmarked debris since their path of travel will not destroy a planet.

(2) Tow three orbital gun turrets to their waypoints. For this task, your fast ship will be used while the Stargazer can continue holding off the three targets. You can place the whole flotilla's SysOps on engines so they can move faster on impulse (and turn better too). Using the tacmap, you can warp the Stargazer to each red marked object and spend about 5 seconds destroying them with phasers.

The scout needs to tractor (1000 MM or less) the turrets near the starbase and tow them (on impulse) to each waypoint. Use the tacmap and stop the scout one or two grid squares from the white marker. Switch to the 3D view and fine tune your final approach to the waypoint.

(3) To destroy the large piece of dedbris, ignore all ships except the scout. You can lace the Stargazer close to the large piece so you can track small objects you can tow nearby (via the short range sensors). Use your scout exclusively and move to any close by small debris, tractor one (you may need to stop your ship first since the tractor beam is buggy), and fly straight into the large debris (collsions do not damage your ship).

Check and see your ship is towing an object by the faint blue ray being emitted from the saucer. You need to tow five or more small objects (harder difficulties may need more pieces) until the piece is destroyed. You need to warp to a small piece to save on time -- warp just half a grid short of your target so you can lay in a 3D course correction -- the time you want to spend is solely on towing pieces back to the large debris and not fighting the shitty cursor control or the wallowing ship movement. If you need to, press RED to stop your ship completely so you can tractor (again -- 1000 MM or less is the tractor range). No weapons will work on the large piece. Once that's done, you can sell your scout ship.

You only need the trusty 'D' in this stage. You can scrap your scout (unless you like using it to hunt down the objectives on this map) and the rest of your flotilla. The thing is you don't really need to do much since the only alien ship that can hurt you here are the Romulan Warbirds, and you can flee from them fairly easily. You want to start saving prestige (you have about 2 stages to do it in) for a four vessel strong Sovereign-class squadron (57,000 points needed).

The blue nebulae in this stage will disable your shields, block you from warping (even after the dissipators are destroyed), and shorten your target acquisition range. You can hide in the nebula and get a range advantage against enemies, but if they get close, you may not be able to escape. You can use the nebulae to sap the enemy shields and hit them hard while they're down.

In any case, you can avoid most of the trouble by getting rid of the patrolling fleet after you disable enough dissipators. Picard will tell you once enough of them are vaporized so you can warp again. While this mission is not as bad as the TOS Klingon missions, there seems to be one regenerating enemy (a Warbird no less), and since it takes forever to take one out, you may want to take out just half of them, scrape up all the small ships and locate the Defiant in the middle of the map. Killing enemy ships though, will earn you a few prestige points you can use for purchasing later.

After lifting the warp restriction, look for the missing Sisko. The Defiant will not move or join your fleet (you can buy one in the next map) but if it's destroyed, you're screwed. Take out the turret nearby, and try to tractor beam the Defiant out of the battle. You can discard the ship anywhere (away from enemies) and focus on disabling the starbase's shields.

Once that's done, beam aboard a suicide team and wait for the ending to kick in. You have about 3 minutes of battle once the transport occurs, so don't scrimp on repairs just yet. Don't blow up the starbase either -- Sisko will need that to make transport. The end kicks in after enough bee-ess occurs on the comm channels.

Recommended Purchase -- as many Sovereign-class battleships as you can afford

This takes place after Insurrection. A lot of new line ships are available and you should be sitting pretty with the prestige. Since there's really nothing more powerful than a Sovereign-class vessel right now, consider getting the more the better. Fighting the Borg in STL is a slug-fest; the Borg have no shields and can take serious damage from torpedos. Three Sovereign-class ships focusing on one Borg level 3 destroyer (spheres and rectangles mostly) are enough to destroy one quickly. The main concern are the level 3 cubes you face. While they only tractor beam your ships, they can destroy your objectives and cause you to fail your mission.

A weird note on the 360 -- the Enterprise-E has a speed listed slower than the default version of Sovereign-class. This leads simalcrum to think the campaign lead ships you get are unique and not multiplayer stock. Beating this mission with one Sovereign-class ship is impossible, two is difficult, three is optimum, and four is overkill.

There are infinite Borg destroyers. They can destroy most of the civilian ships without a thought. There are two Borg Cubes that destroy planets. If a planet is destroyed, the flow of escape ships stops from that planet and you cannot save the 15 ships you need to complete the stage. First, split the flotilla to fight the enemies coming at the nearest escape ships. Firing once on an enemy will cause them to fire on you (supposedly) but not always. Sending one ship to deal with the left side while two to take charge of the middle is a good idea.

Once the initial wave of ships are at your starbase, regroup your flotilla and assault one of the Borg Cubes. If you leave your sysops at 100 percent shields, you can overwhelm the smaller ships, but you need 100 percent weapon power to quickly take down the enemy cubes. Since the cubes don't fire, you can circle them and hound them to death (note to Borg players online, pair up with a buddy or use the tactical cube). Killing both Borg cubes lets you stamp out the Borg brush fires and let escape ships continuously stream to your insertion point. When you get 15 escape ships to reach your starbase, you win.

Recommended Purchase -- as many Sovereign-class battleships as you can afford

This stage is messy fun. The prestige from the last mission will let you outfit your flotilla with four Sovereign-class battleships, which is pretty much all you want to have in the final blood frenzy. This stage is the Bajor infinite wave stage with the station being very tough and firing. Actually, DS9 is very weak if you let the enemies converge on it. You need to warp to the north, east, and west and fight out the enemies. Saving as many allied NPC ships only increases your disposable fleet size, so by all means attack aggressively.

Once all the enemies in that area of space are gone, stop engines locate the bracketed ship and issue a 'hail' command. In the event the bracketed ship is destroyed, use the tactical map to locate any survivors and hail that ship. The hailing ship will serve as the anchor of the NPC fleet, so if that ship is destroyed, your NPCs will do nothing.

Go around the Bajor area and kick ass. Once all three fleets are nullified, the boss appears (she's the only one with shielding on her ship). Take out the supporting enemies first so you can weather the storm. Unless DS9 is about to explode (meaning 50 percent life), you can ignore the boss until you stomped out her robosexual buddies. Aim at the boss ship and when it's destroyed, you win.

Recommended Purchase -- as many Sovereign-class battleships as you can afford

Go ahead and make an all Sovereign-class flotilla. There is a 360 achievement for this (not known why). This stage is hard only because you have to protect sensor arrays and you can only mess up twice before you have to fight through 75 percent of the stage to do it again. Luckily, it's not as hard as you think since enemies only aim at the sensors once they are in place (and you can fight while towing the spare sensors -- to do a quick replacement).

The first step is to get near the boss in the middle of the map. Notice the nebula will destroy your ship if you go too near the planet. Stay above the boss and ignore her. Focus on the other enemy ships (esp. the big ones) and take out the spheres first, then the diamonds, and then the obelisks. Who wants some Lucky Charms? When the cubes show up, pull three ships off to deal with the cube and leave one ship to mop out small defenders. Remember if you damage a Borg ship, kill it or it will regenerate to full health -- wasting your torpedos and time.

Destroy the tactical cube when it shows up (apparently, the damage is adjusted for campaign). Once that's done, destroy the second tactical cube and its accompanying diamond cruiser. When these three key enemies are dead, you can head south and make repairs from the repair ship. Have each of your Sovereigns tractor one sensor and move them at full impulse back to the center.

Take two of your ships and aim them at the top waypoint (in the 3D view); take the other two and aim them at the bottom waypoint (in the 3D view). Once both sensors are in place, regroup the ships and aim at any enemy firing on the sensors. If you use the aiming cursor and tab BUMPER R, you can quickly provoke the enemies aiming at the sensors into firing on you. Keep the shields strong and once the timer (about 10 seconds) drops to zero, you can aim at the boss and damage her.

Kill the boss and win the game. There is no Defiant or Voyager levels, since adestroyer will die in normal campaigns. Doing this mission alone with one Sovereign (achievement) is stupid but possible. Expect your vessel to be very heavily damaged.

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